This interview focuses on the theoretical and design work of the late 1970s and early 1980s that I called Space as Matrix, a concept that I believe continues to be relevant today.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s you became known in New York both as a feminist and as a designer through the international publication of two projects, the Law Offices for a prominent art collector and the exhibition Women in Amarican Architecture. Can you tell us a bit about this time and context?
Yes, I had parallel dual lives in New York, one focusing on architectural theory and practice — teaching and designing — the other centered on women’s rights and feminist approaches to the environment. During this time these two living threads remained separate, as architecture was still far away from incorporating feminism, which was considered a subversive ideology in a world entirely dominated by white men. They might have been inclined to accept a woman in their midst, but only as a token. The first teaching job I had required that the one woman in the faculty that had been hired the year before be removed to make place for me. This was the same approach of “one at a time” that had been used with previous tokens: male jews and male people of color. I wanted very much to break this pattern and join both threads, but it wasn’t possible not only because of the resistance of the men, who anyway were protected from feminism by the token approach, but because the rejection of feminism by women in the profession, whether out of fear or because they really wanted to believe in meritocracy without asking why they didn’t get the work and rewards they deserved that were instead given to men.
During this time I became part of a small group of women architects who met at The Architectural Legue of New York, most of them “womanists”who wanted to improve the situation of women in the profesion without changing the values and system that promoted their exclusion. This group wanted to make women architects visible through an exhibition that was not limited to New York. We realized we needed to find other women architects and create an archive of their work, while also doing historical research. As this research advanced, we became aware that the most important contributions to architecture by women were done by women who did not have a professional education. A great example was Catherine Beecher, sister of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose book titled The American Woman’s Home of 1869 was far more influential than any architect’s work in the design of houses at the turn of the 20th century.
Because of my qualifications and experience I became the curator and exhibition designer of Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, an exhibition that travelled all over the country and The Netherlands. It was quite succesful with lots of publications in newspapers, magazines and professional journals. We had three articles in The New York Times, including a very favorable review by Ada Louise Huxtable, then the most important architecture critic in the country. At the same time, my design for Law Offices where I explored the idea of site as matrix was published in two journals, including the cover of one of them, and selected by the AIA Journal as one of the “memorable spaces” of the 1970s. So I became well-known as a feminist, a co-founder of Heresies, the art and politics journal and also as a designer, making the men in the profession take notice.
There are two concepts that were that were at the core of your practice. The first one was Site Matrices…
Yes, my theoretical and design work was focused first on what I called Site Matrices. This was later expanded to challenge through feminism the architectural representation of residential and institutional buildings, a subject for a separate interview. What was a “site matrix?” and how did I use the word “matrix”, a word that has too many meanings? By “matrix” I meant taking into account the site conditions on my designs, instead of imagining the site as a tabula rasa or constructing a platform over topographic “accidents.” The attempt to ignore or conceal site conditions is even more common in interior design. To bring site into the foreground, whether for buildings or interiors, I developed the idea of a site matrix, an analytical drawing mapping the interaction of site conditions, including cultural contexts. These were large-scale drawings (8 feet or almost 2 and a half meters in length) that I also called “Working Drawings.” These were meant as a critique of eye-candy watercolor perspectives. I called them “Working Drawings” because they contained conceptual information about the space or building represented, including texts, as do construction drawings (also called “working drawings”) . Some of this information was in the form of analytical diagrams; some in the form of photographic images and writing; and some in the form of axonometric drawings revealing the conceptual structure of a project.
The second was “Space as Matrix”, originally described in a drawing you called “The House of Meanings.” Could you describe them?
The concept of Space as Matrix was intended primarily for houses and housing rather than unique buildings, because housing and houses have a major role in creating urban form. Like the city, the house is one of culture’s most powerful symbolic forms. It embodies specific, usually dominant, ideologies about how people should live, what kinds of values and hierarchies they have, and how its occupants should relate to the public world. Historically, the image and form of housing have bee used by both rulers and reformers to promote their beliefs.
The House of Meanings , a conceptual drawings of 1970-72 – was so called to oppose the “house of no-meanings” that focused on formal rather than social issues, and dominated the experimental discourse in architecture during the mid-and late 1970s. It was also intended to respond to the need for growth and transformation of living spaces through indeterminacy, a premise developed from the logic of vernacular architecture which continues to be valid today.
The House of Meanings is not a specific house. Rather, it uses the principle of space as matrix. I defined the matrix space as an alternative to the division of space into enclosed rooms or dwellings which, in their size and location establish a rigid hierarchy of importance among members of a household or a society. It is also a critique of the sharp spatial separation between private rooms and dwellings from public shared spaces. The matrix space assumes a breakdown of the conventional distinction between private and public and individual and shared, proposing an interaction between opposites.
If Modernism gave us the competing spatial logics of the Free Plan and the Raum Plan, how can we historically position Space as Matrix?
The Free Plan and the Raum Plan are two spatial concepts developed in the early stages of modernity that are now basic models for the design of buildings as finite objects. Designing spaces on the principles of Space as Matrix is determined neither by the location of structure to create either rooms or open, unplanned space as in the Free plan, nor by the spatial definition of enclosures according to their hierarchy in a building as in the Raum Plan. Matrix spaces can be multifunctional, like in an open plan, or have a dynamic section to include intimacy or monumentality in a spatial sequence like in the Raum Plan. But, unlike Free and Raum Plan concepts, Matrix spaces are not finite. They preserve, at least conceptually, a lack of certainty, because a dwelling can change, grow or contract, and become continuous with a neighborhood or even a city designed with the same principles.
You designed two houses in the Caribbean following the Space as Matrix principles. Can you describe how you applied the concept with the clients’ needs? Did the concept lend itself to a tropical climate, given the fluid interior/exterior relationships?
The earliest designs for houses following these principles were in Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, both unbuilt. The first was a second home for an American art patron with international friendships; it presented the clearest opportunity for indeterminacy because of the open lot and changing uses. The second was for a Dominican family of a mother of two daughters, one living with her in Santo Domingo, the other married to an American physician who would visit for extended periods of time; it is like two separate houses joined by the shared spaces of dining room and kitchen. It was an accident that both projects were for tropical sites, providing for fluid exterior/interior relationships. The spaces defined by parallel walls were traversed by a linear space connecting the length of each house. This forms the basic structure of Space as Matrix, which can also be described as being similar to the textile structure of warp and weft, where the warp is made up of fixed parallel threads, whereas the weft is woven between the threads, creating a much freer surface and volume. In other words, the warp underlies the freer spatial narrative of the weft.
During a number of years I assembled — with the participation of former students, employees and other colleagues — interdisciplinary teams to work on competitions where site and spatial matrices were explored at the urban and landscape scale. A particularly interesting exploration was for a competition site in the American Midwest, where the urban pattern was formed by alternating urban and landscape open areas, a more extreme version of Space as Matrix.
Can the Carboneras community be seen as the culmination of your investigations regarding Space as Matrix as applied to housing? Why did it take so long to build an example?
The Carboneras community is the first built example of Space as Matrix. It is on the urban limit of an seaside village in Spain. It took me 35 years to be able to build it. The land I purchased in 1970 had dissapeared under the national coastal line that limits construction to protect the Mediterranean sea. When this line was modified I was able to build. Creating a place based on Space as Matrix principles required my becoming the developer, so I could reject the prevailing mode of development on any beachfront, which is to create a maximum of minimum standard dwellings to rent or sell for maximum benefits. Instead, I built just about half of what was possible to build after deciding that it was more important to create the Space as Matrix experiment, providing the separation needed to allow for both privacy and community. And I was able to build it without losing money.
Do you see it as a a model for the future of housing and cities?
Matrix spaces –especially the weaving of built and open spaces in cities – were much in demand during the recent pandemic. Such spaces should continue to be required in public housing because the objective is to create conditions where open spaces, buildings and social life are interlaced together making for better living environments in cities for all classes of people, not just the very wealthy.